


if not me, who could you love?

by ddeulgi



Category: TWICE (Band)
Genre: F/F, Mythology References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:54:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27504892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ddeulgi/pseuds/ddeulgi
Summary: They'll find each other again, be with each other again, love each other again, and lose each other again. Again and again, until the world ceases to exist and the universe cracks into two.
Relationships: Hirai Momo/Minatozaki Sana
Comments: 3
Kudos: 59
Collections: #GGFLASHFIC





	if not me, who could you love?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ultmyouimina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultmyouimina/gifts).



This is _not_ where the story first begins, but it’s somewhere in between.

  
  


Sana is a progeny linked to Amaterasu. Momo is a servant seized from the lands across the western strait.

It starts out when Sana catches the girl idling next to a statue in the courtyard. Sana is normally not one to worry herself with trivial things, especially things concerning the house servants, but there's just _something_ about this girl that drives her legs to move in her direction. Forget her appointment with the consul — she eventually finds herself standing next to the other girl anyway, Momo sending her all sorts of wide-eyed "what are you doing"s before she turns away the minute Sana casts a glance to her side. This all feels sickeningly familiar, and she knows Momo senses the same when the girl's gaze fleets from between her and the statue. Sana, with her golden amulets and kimono of the finest red. Momo, with her fraying sandals and patchy kimono procured from scraps of fabric.

Their eyes meet. Then, everything clicks. Memories from years, decades, centuries ago start to fill in the gaps. _This is not the first time we've met._

"Do you remember this?" Momo asks a few beats later, voice hushed down to a whisper. "When She had not set foot upon this temple yet, but destruction did."

"Yes," Sana replies without much hesitance, gaze latched onto the shining gold of the statue rather than the other girl. "Death by stone hurt, did it not?"

Momo lets out a breath, somewhere between relief and disbelief. "It did."

Sana grins — shy, almost jaw aching. “Thank you. I never got to tell you that."

  
  


Momo is feisty even though she's all lanky limbs, flesh and bones, and some packed brawn somewhere underneath all that tanned, pockmarked skin. She spits on Sana after a rather mundane request, the nth one after all their time here, really. It's not hard to become fed up. Sana isn't mad, hardly, and the other girl isn't quite remorseful either, a wide grin across her face moments later, a bit of spit dribbled on her chin. Guess she's tired of being a servant.

The guards immediately haul her away, and Sana only watches with a soft laugh that Momo winks at, a twinkle of amusement in her eyes.

This time, it's Momo that fares the best. She's the Emperor's youngest child, the golden crown princess born holy. She's eighteen now — a meticulously crafted maiden fated to be wedded off to a suitor of her father's choosing.

Come wedding day, it is the first time she will meet her spouse. Momo doesn’t expect much — the Army general’s son or perhaps a Southern Kingdom prince or maybe even the magistrate's fat son who got stuck in a water basin once — and just hopes they are nice and will leave her mostly be during their new life together.

It happens at the family altar. After they've bowed, made their offerings, and received familial blessings, does she finally get to meet them. Momo is not even sure if she's dreading this or not.

It's rather cinematic. The red veil atop her head is lifted and it's like time slows with its movement.

She hears it before she sees it. "I've been waiting for you."

It's a voice she doesn't recognize, but the eyes are telltale: the crinkle into half moons, the twinkle of gold — the only sign she's held desperately onto for nearly thousands of years now. Momo's heart skips, just like it always does. Thousands of years and she still gets the same old butterflies.

"I have been too," she says in return, almost breathlessly.

Sana smiles, trademark as well, and Momo's heart soars. It’s a wonderful feeling.

  
  


It is the first life they get married, but it is also their shortest life together.

Their life together is happy and as quiet as it can be. Being married to Sana, after all, is a lovely affair. It’s not quite often they get to spend their lives tied together anyway, by the universe and by union.

Momo is, without a doubt, enamored. It might be her favorite lifetime so far. Sana even talks about a further future — perhaps fostering a child soon to secure orderly succession to the throne, but a child _together_ nonetheless.

But it’s not long until Sana's home in the South becomes a warring state, and as the next heir to the throne, Sana must go back.

With a kiss to the forehead and a promise of coming back, Sana goes. She always goes.

Time passes, like it always does, and true to her promise, Sana does come back in the end.

In an urn at her front gates.

Maybe next time then.

  
  


They've moved thousands of miles northwest. Sana is once again stuck with a faint lineage to a mighty figure. Momo, a priestess under the Temple of Artemis. She has almond curved eyes and a soft smile, much like the many other clerics, but Sana would've been able to discern her anywhere. Any year, any century, any lifetime.

The festivals they hold for the Gods is a waste of everyone's time, she learns much later after having to attend countless before. But no one dares say anything, as the Gods have no second thoughts about dispelling any mere mortal with ill-thoughts and a big mouth, so she throws her fresh rabbit and goblet of wine in the offering fire anyway and takes up five more for herself.

Maybe she's gotten too drunk, maybe it's the double vision, or maybe it's because her own two shaky arms are moving by themselves, eyes trained right on the group of giggling priestesses staring back at her — Momo squints at her the sight of her, works up a discontent smile of sorts — but she picks up a bunch of grapes, meant to be for an offering rather than consumption, and makes way to the pretty girls. 

It's funny and perhaps a bit dramatic: she pops one right in her mouth and well, a deity above must've been unhappy with her because it's like she forgets how to chew, or perhaps she's too intoxicated to remember basic human function, but she chokes. And then she falls, straight toward the ground. She doesn't catch herself in time and her face slams right into the ground, bone cracking and blood splattering against stone.

Chaos erupts around her, all types of screaming and shouting raised by the decibel with every second that passes. She’s rolled onto her back, Momo hovering above her, or at least she thinks it's Momo, when her vision starts to dot white and black in all the places they're not supposed to. Then laughter fills her ears, rich and bright and insanely beautiful, and the déjà vu from centuries ago hits but she's too half dead to return the gesture.

"Next time," is the last thing she can make out. 

She laughs so hard that it kills her.

Here, Sana is a rather scornful deity, the recluse incarnate of the dragon that resides within the high heavens after a tragic genocide of her kind. Granted a place in the Zodiacs, she — the last of the dragons — despises mortals at all costs, especially since she's lived thousands and thousands of years and believes she knows human nature by heart. Humans, for one, are the greediest of all.

In the end, she's cast down to the evil confines of Earth, after the Jade Emperor had quite frankly had enough of her refusal to follow responsibility. For the dragon is symbolized by auspicious means, and here she is doing anything but so. He likens her to acting like a worm instead and Sana has never been more offended in all her life(times).

With nothing but gilded robes switched for tacky mortal clothes and a small pouch of gold, she ends up right in a radish patch—

"My radishes!"

— _someone's_ radish patch.

Sana was just shot off a cloud, into planet Earth at inhuman speeds, and right into someone's radishes. And the person cares only about their radishes. Not the fact that somebody was just catapulted into the ground in a way a normal human being could not have survived. Just the radishes. She was right for hating humans. Selfish little things they are.

Sana sits up almost abruptly, perfectly unscathed besides some smudges of dirt here and there. Immediately, she meets caramel eyes that glimmer with recognition.

Her heart feels soft. Oh, well, maybe Earth won't be so bad after all.

"You stink," is the first thing Sana says when she lays back down against the poor radishes. This is not the best way to make her grand entrance on Earth, but the person she meets first makes it somewhat... bearable at least. "Like... human."

"You stink," the other girl trudges over with a smile growing on her face, hovering right above Sana, "you just landed in a bunch of cow poop."

Scratch that. Once she goes back to the higher heavens, she is going to decimate this planet.

Squashed radishes and cow poop aside, Momo finally gets her out of her radish patch with a promise that it was in fact all soil and no cow poop whatsoever. She wipes a thumb across Sana's cheek when she pulls her close, rubbing off the remainder of dirt.

"Finally," she says and it's barely a whisper. "I've missed you."

Even deities aren't privy to feelings. Sana, even as powerful and almighty as she is, can only drop her head to meet the curve of Momo's neck, face pressed against sweaty skin. She nods furiously in return, a “me too” of sorts, and Momo can only laugh.

  
  


On Earth, Momo smells like dirt, sweat, and wet fur more times than considered normal.

She's a farmer's daughter, though her parents were long gone. All they left her was a shoddy little farmhouse, some pigs, and a dying field. Miraculously, she makes things work.

"You're human," Sana says one day, almost distastefully, when Momo is back from her field work. Her skin is slick with sweat and hands dirty and calloused. Nevertheless, Sana nuzzles her cheek closer to Momo's palm when she cups her cheek. "I don't think I can be with you this time."

"Is that so?" Momo muses, pulling off her farmer's hat.

Sana only blinks once and all of a sudden, two pairs of ears don the top Momo's head. They perk up and Momo can only smile sheepishly, gripping her little farmer’s hat tighter.

Ah, so _that's_ why Momo always smells like an animal.

Momo’s staring at her with puppy dog eyes like she expects to get kicked out onto the streets for her shocking-but-not-shocking reveal. In fact, Sana is hardly fazed. She's literally a dragon herself anyway.

"Okay," Sana laughs, reaching up to tug at Momo’s ears. The girl whines in return. "I can be with a dog."

"I'm not a dog! I have nine tails!"

  
  


Life with Momo, once again, is nice.

Earth proves itself to be tolerable, and mortals alike to some degree though Sana would still have no second thoughts dispelling them to the deepest court of Hell. Nearly everything is flammable here too, and Momo has to tell her to stop setting things on fire, but other than that, it's an okay planet. She does, however, meet a nice girl that sells cabbages in the village. Her name is Tzuyu. Sana would send her to purgatory instead.

She wonders why she had even bothered to become a Zodiac. Zodiacs, for one, don't get kissed good morning and good night, nor do they have a place for them at the table, in bed, in someone's life.

Being a Zodiac is lonely, boring, and filled with menial duties — all she does it sit in the throne room, cast a few fortunes to the lands below, listen to the rabbit zodiac (named Dahyun, whom she is _so_ unfortunately placed next to in the Grand Hall) drone on and on about nothing of importance, and repeat. For centuries upon centuries.

Being with Momo is fun, like it _always_ is, with days filled with laughter and all sorts of sunshine (mostly in the form of Momo’s smile). Her heart feels so full — the fullest it has been in her most recent lives — at the mere thought of the girl and it starts feeling like she could do this forever. Be with Momo, see Momo, feel Momo, love Momo, lose Momo.

Forever. It’s a big word. She can only wish.

  
  


However, this story is not any different. They do not end up together.

The Jade Emperor finds out about them and cuts Sana's retribution on Earth short. The life of a Zodiac is meant to be one of solitude, he had said, and there would be no place for her at the side of someone else. She is for everyone, not a single person. Sana knows better than to defy someone like the Jade Emperor, who very much so holds her life by a thread. She is the last dragon after all — that title alone carries a weight that Sana, regardless of how happy she is with Momo, can't bear to ignore in the end.

Momo, with her ears pressed flat against her head, sees her off. She hands Sana a radish to keep, says that deities, no matter how high in the clouds they live, need to eat too, and it just so happens that Sana gets the best radish out of them all.

"Next time," she says. She sounds sad. Her ears are a dead giveaway. Sana feels her heart deflate and she wants to reach out and touch her one last time, but something deep inside tells her not to. Maybe she'll do it next time instead.

"Next time," Sana repeats, even though she already knows it always ends the same way.

  
  


They will meet for many lifetimes more, under all sorts of different circumstances, be it when they're twelve years old or fifty-six. Anywhere. Everywhere. When Sana is once again a child of higher order, or maybe Momo will be instead. Maybe Momo will get to be a kitsune again and maybe Sana actually gets to be a fire-breathing dragon rather than one of reverence. Maybe they can get married and _stay_ married next time.

Each time, someone will go. Someone will promise a next time.

They’re not sad. Anything but. Their lives, as intertwined as they are, give them each other. No matter what. It’s not a curse. Rather, it’s a blessing.

They'll find each other again, be with each other again, love each other again, and lose each other again. Again and again, until the world ceases to exist and the universe cracks into two.

It's bittersweet, hardly a love story really, but it's with Momo regardless, and well, Sana wouldn't have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!!!!
> 
> this is the first fic ive written for someone and for a fic fest!! yay!!! ALSO... this serves as sort of a writing comeback after 9 months? hehe...  
> seems a bit familiar right ... this trope is arguably one of my most favorites to write so i just couldnt pass up the chance :)  
> shortfic is a bit hard for me since i always want to expand on so much, but i had some fun with this :D
> 
> twt: @pikatzus


End file.
